Book Image

Rust Web Programming

By : Maxwell Flitton
Book Image

Rust Web Programming

By: Maxwell Flitton

Overview of this book

Are safety and high performance a big concern for you while developing web applications? While most programming languages have a safety or speed trade-off, Rust provides memory safety without using a garbage collector. This means that with its low memory footprint, you can build high-performance and secure web apps with relative ease. This book will take you through each stage of the web development process, showing you how to combine Rust and modern web development principles to build supercharged web apps. You'll start with an introduction to Rust and understand how to avoid common pitfalls when migrating from traditional dynamic programming languages. The book will show you how to structure Rust code for a project that spans multiple pages and modules. Next, you'll explore the Actix Web framework and get a basic web server up and running. As you advance, you'll learn how to process JSON requests and display data from the web app via HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You'll also be able to persist data and create RESTful services in Rust. Later, you'll build an automated deployment process for the app on an AWS EC2 instance and Docker Hub. Finally, you'll play around with some popular web frameworks in Rust and compare them. By the end of this Rust book, you'll be able to confidently create scalable and fast web applications with Rust.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1:Setting Up the Web App Structure
4
Section 2:Processing Data and Managing Displays
8
Section 3:Data Persistence
12
Section 4:Testing and Deployment

Authenticating our requests

Throughout this book, we have been intercepting HTTP requests before they've hit the view in order to inspect the header and extract the token. If the token cannot be verified when we were interacting with to-do item views, we rejected the request and gave an unauthorized response to the user.

It is tempting to start constructing middleware for our Rocket views. However, Rocket provides streamlined mechanisms known as request and data guards. In order to implement a request guard, we are going to define our own JWT and apply it to our get items view.

Implementing a request guard

Follow these steps to implement a request guard:

  1. We will begin by making a src/jwt.rs file and importing the rocket dependencies needed for a JWT struct processes with the following code:
    use rocket::Outcome;
    use rocket::http::Status;
    use rocket::request::{self, Request, FromRequest};

    The FromRequest struct is needed to enable our JWT struct to be implemented...